SPARES HIGH SCHOOLS School start moved to Aug. 26
eats up lots of the savings they’re talking about.”
The Chicago Teachers Union has been calling in vain for a moratorium on all school actions for at least two years to give the district time to study the impact of school closings on displaced students and to come up with a long-term facilities plan.
They announced Friday plans to hold workshops Saturday morning across the city to teach parents how to keep individual schools open.
“CPS has more than 100 schools — our schools — on the chopping block,” CTU President Karen Lewis said in a statement. “We’re going into these neighborhoods and uniting with our brothers and sisters to help them fight for the schools and the quality education they deserve.”
Chicago Public Schools will start classes on Aug. 26 this coming school year — ending a long-held practice of a post-Labor Day opening, under a proposal announced Friday.
Classes will end on June 10; spring break will span April 14-18, and half-days for teacher training will be scrapped.
That’s the result of months of discussion following a mutual agreement by CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union to move from a split system — with two thirds of schools opening the day after Labor Day and one third opening in mid-August under a “year-round” calendar — in favor of one “unified” calendar.
School board members must still approve the proposal. The decision would not apply to CPS charter schools, which can set their own calendars.
CPS parent Nadia Gould said she’s had children split across both calendars, and views the postLabor Day opening as less disruptive. But she’s pleased that parents won’t have to juggle kids on two different schedules.
Previously, “We could never plan a family vacation because one of the kids was always in school,’’ Gould said. “I’m very happy we’re going to have one calendar for all parents. It’s not what I prefer, but I think it will be OK’’
The nation’s third-largest school district tried an August school start years ago under then-Schools CEO Paul Vallas. But in 2000, when it opened its doors Aug. 22, it experienced the worst opening-day attendance in at least six years. About one in four students stayed home for the first day of classes. The following year, CPS returned to a September opening.
Since then, school districts nationwide have been moving to August start dates, often to give kids more time to prepare for standardized tests, said Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.
“Primarily, districts that are moving in this direction are doing it as an advantage to students,’’ Domenech said.
August starts are certainly the trend in Illinois, where CPS was one of only four public school districts to have a post-Labor Day opening this school year, State Board of Education data indicates.
“We are one district, with one vision, and we want to provide our school community with one calendar that makes sense from the classroom to the kitchen table,’’ Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said of the proposal in a Friday news statement.
“Families all across our city struggle to coordinate busy sched- ules with school, work and play and this unified calendar was designed to best meet the needs of our families’ home lives while giving our schools the time they need to implement a rigorous curriculum.”
The new CPS calendar also would provide for a five-day Thanksgiving holiday, starting Wednesday, Nov. 28, and a winter break that would run from Dec. 23 to Jan. 3. Report card pickup would happen on the same day — rather than separate days — for elementary and high school students.
The proposal follows focus-group meetings and a CPS online survey of close to 4,600 parents and some 2,000 students in a system of 403,000 students. Parent Gould said that a Jan. 11 CPS briefing she attended indicated 51 percent of parents and students surveyed favored an August opening, while 41 percent preferred a September opening.
Teachers who answered the survey overwhelmingly liked a school calendar with an August start, with 80 percent of them favoring it.